Creating a way of living each day, still including travel tales, and appreciation of places, events, and cultures, but also thoughtful examination of life and all that entails.
I welcome any and all questions, comments, arguments, refutations, criticisms... sea stories..

Friday, August 28, 2009

More of the same electronic woes..

So after submitting a report about the forgotten repair on the laptop, and then also pointing out a new issue on it, I now have to call in to get the approval for return shipping to have these repairs done. Why isn't email sufficient? I described the problems, and they need only to tell me that they will have it picked up and fixed..

On a similar but far more frustrating front, I had to deal with AT&T (Southwestern Bell really) again. I want to cancel my old phone contract since I have no phone which uses that number anymore, and at the same time start up a data only plan for a PDA or similar device. Simple right? All I would need to do is go into the AT&T store, tell them what I need, and they will take care of it.. or as it happens, not.

Never once has anyone in any AT&T store ever been helpful, and never even once have they actually answered my questions or handled whatever it was that I needed. In Wichita they actually would not read my sim card so I could retrieve my numbers unless I would buy at least the $200 phone. Here they could not set me up with a go phone account unless I purchased a $60 phone. (I went through Best Buy and paid $20, and received a $10 credit!). In Austin the kid who was supposed to be helping me knew less about their contracts than I do, and he asserted repeatedly that AT&T did not offer any data plans.. Strange thing to claim given that the website clearly indicates that they do offer such plans..

So now I have to call in to cancel the service, and try to convince whoever answers the phone on their end, after the obligatory 15 minute or more wait on hold, that I really do just want a data plan, without a phone, and preferably without a long contract, if any at all. I have the phone that they try to use to justify the two year contracts so all I need is the service and the sim card.. Anyone believe that AT&T will actually give me customer service? No one?

If there were any other option where I am building, I would go with it.. Ever since SWB bought AT&T, the customer service has simply stopped.

"How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it." — Edward Abbey

"I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. " — Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience)

"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn." — Henry David Thoreau

"A man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting his living." — Henry David Thoreau